“Like you a lot——Oh, no, I mean—what the devil do girls say? I suppose I ought to know as I’ve read that question five hundred times in novels. Wish I could remember the answers.”
“Say what you think you would say if you really were a girl rather interested and I were trying to make you more so.”
Gita raked her mind. This little comedy with Eustace often amused her. “I—think—I’m rather beginning to,” she faltered, and batted her eyelashes as she had seen Eva Le Gallienne do on the stage a few nights since.
Eustace drew up his chair and bent over her. He had begun to turn off the lights before they fell into conversation and in the soft dimness he looked rather handsome to Gita’s critical eye. Distinguished he always looked. Perhaps she had been wrong—hadn’t known her personal predilections so well, after all . . . if it were in her to “love” any man it should be this one, who combined so much, and whom, her sharp eyes had long since informed her, other women found so attractive. She smiled indulgently and repressed a desire to say: “Go ahead.” She would play up.
Bylant himself was a little at a loss. He had never set out deliberately to “woo” a woman, and although he had more than once fallen into step without visible effort, he had, on the whole, accepted casually and briefly what was offered him. He felt resentfully that he would know how to handle the situation in a novel, and wondered why pen-experience should avail him so little when it came to his own vital concerns. Possibly because he was so confoundedly in earnest, and detachment annihilated.
“Beginning?” He laid his hand on hers.
Gita patted it amiably. “Nice hands. Strong, but well-shaped. Not too artistic to be manly. And always warm, and not too soft—or white. That’s your golf and tennis——”
“Oh, Gita!” he said despairingly. “Lovers—would-be lovers—don’t. . . . You should either draw your hand away shyly or turn it over and give mine a slight pressure.”
“All right. Let’s begin over. I think I’ll do the last. You often make me feel you’re here to hang on to——”
“You’re not worried about anything?” In the dim light he had caught a fleeting expression of fear in her eyes—or fancied it?